


Lancelot

by Thimblerig



Series: The Lion and the Serpent [39]
Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hair-petting, Hurt/Comfort, Literary Geekery, Sad Fluff, Sleepy Cuddles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-10
Updated: 2017-07-10
Packaged: 2018-11-30 02:55:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11454507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thimblerig/pseuds/Thimblerig
Summary: "It will be better in the morning."





	Lancelot

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mylos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mylos/gifts).



> For Mylos: “I'd love to see... Athos talking (or otherwise convincing) an agitated Aramis into sleep.”

“I feel so very stupid,” Aramis said, looking at the little stone pot on the table. It was empty, bar a few shreds of dried rosemary and feverfew, and a heavy iron kettle steamed beside it, scorching the wood.”

“We’ll send d’Artagnan out to the town apothecary in the morning, before we ride out.”

Aramis took a breath. 

“He has young legs,” said Athos quellingly, “and I was given the recipe.” He looked at the smudges under Aramis’ eyes and the set of his mouth. “Can you rest?”

“It’s just a headache,” Aramis said, producing a smile. “I’m perfectly functional.”

Athos seated himself at the head of the bed. It was narrow - this latest hostelry was not the best - but decently soft. “But if you rest now,” he purred, “you can be better than functional.” Aramis’ eyebrows quirked. Athos patted the straw-stuffed pallet. “I will guard your dreams as well as I may.”

Aramis tipped his head slightly. “Wishes aren’t everything.”

“They’re not nothing.” Athos let his gaze drift away as he tugged at the finger of one of his leather gloves with his teeth, then another, easing the glove off and working on his other hand.

“Has anyone ever called you manipulative?” He could hear a hint of a more genuine smile in Aramis’ voice. 

“Only recently,” he replied soberly.

 _“The people I put up with,”_ Aramis muttered in Spanish. A creak, a shift of weight, and he crawled under the coarse woollen blanket and scratchy sheet, resting his head gingerly on Athos lap. He lay there stiffly, on his side, but sighed when Athos feathered his fingers along his temple and traced featherlight patterns.

“Sir Lancelot went mad, too,” he said after a while.

“He came back from it,” Athos answered, letting his fingers stray into his friend’s hair.

“I always thought of him as a bit ugly. _Jolie laide._ You know. Maybe a crooked eyebrow or a broken nose to make things interesting.”

“The kind of ugly that women loved?”

“Here’s to our Ill-Made Knight: no grails, no wives, always falling at the final hurdle...”

“There was healing in his hands, Aramis, and God loved him.”

“Tcheh.”

“Who could condemn one who strays because of kindness?”

“I have smoked you out, old friend: your thorny rosebush holds the sweetest of flowers.” 

“That is your metaphor?”

“It will do for tonight, you old softy.” Perhaps despite himself, Aramis was relaxing under the touch. Athos let his fingers trail slowly through his hair.

 _“More_ glass?” Aramis said plaintively. Athos frowned, hands stilling. “I pray you Athos, have mercy, please do not cut off my hair.”

“I won’t,” Athos murmured.

Aramis stirred under his hands. “Porthos’ shoulder...”

“... Will be well enough. They sent us ice, from the palace.” He remembered now - after the Fortress of Marmion, and the eclipse, and the death, tending to Aramis’ head and damaged leg. He’d told the others Aramis would rest better in quiet which was entirely a lie, but, battered from the fall, Aramis had become alarmingly talkative.

“Well then. D'Artagnan has good hands,” Aramis muttered drowsily. Then he veered straight into, “I held my son today.”

 _He’s not your son,_ Athos had answered at the time, the only kindness he could find the quiet brutality of a denial. Tonight he replied, “A fine boy.”

“He’s getting so big.” Aramis flapped an uneasy hand. “I know. I know, Athos: look don't touch. Don't even look.”

“I am sorry,” Athos said, gravel in his throat. 

“Agnes was right, it hurts.” Silence. “She’d hate what I do. I’m glad she didn’t have to choose.” Athos stroked his hair, uncertain. “I should stop it. I know it, Athos. I’ll end it with Marguerite tomorrow.”

“An you think best.”

“Be sure your sins will find you out,” Aramis said, very seriously.

“Nothing that suffers can pass without merit in the eyes of God,” Athos replied, hands still moving. The long scalp cut Aramis had had from the fall through the high window was almost vanished, lost in the rough scarring of the more recent injury. Athos barely touched it, careful. _Someone must have been there,_ he thought to himself. _Not even you could survive this on your own._

“What punishment of God is not a gift?” Aramis breathed, relaxing further. “I’m sorry for fussing, dominie, it doesn’t matter. It will be better in the morning.”

“It will,” Athos promised. 

“‘He heard the birds sing in the morning and was comforted’,” Aramis quoted Lancelot’s tale lightly.

“Yes.”

Silence, but for Aramis’ deepening breaths, and then he was gone into sleep, though whether it was darkness or peace, Athos could not say.

**Author's Note:**

> // Lancelot did have healing in his hands - one of his stories is about an injured knight who would not heal until his wounds were ‘searched’ (opened and recleaned) by ‘the most perfect knight in the world’. Lancelot pulled it off, even though he knew, adulterous sinner that he was at the time, that he was unworthy. And then, as Sir Thomas Malory’s version has it, “he wept like a child who had been beaten.” The interpretation of Lancelot as simultaneously a Perfect Knight and a Well-Meaning Screw-Up is one that I will take to my grave. Can you understand why?
> 
> // “The kind of ugly that women loved?” - a tip of the hat to Rosemary Sutcliff’s versions of Lancelot/Bedwyr. The ‘running mad in the woods’ part is in at least some of the retellings, including the _Morte d’Arthur_. It was a fairly traditional trope in the line of reacting to great stress.


End file.
